Facebook Revamps Thrift

The forked version of the code is now available for download.

by Developer.com Staff

Feb 21, 2014

Facebook has forked one of its own open source projects—the Thrift toolset for creating distributed applications. "We didn’t make this a breaking change," explained Facebook infrastructure engineer Blake Matheny. "It can still interact with legacy Thrift applications. But the C++ in Apache Thrift is fairly different from this one—we basically did a bunch of work to improve the scalability with C++, which is important to us because a lot of our popular services are built with Thrift."

Because the Thrift project is now managed by Apache, it's not clear if the changes will be integrated into the original project. Key features in the new version include out-of-order operations, improved memory handling and a new header protocol.